


Filling in the Details

by intravenusann



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-12
Updated: 2012-05-12
Packaged: 2017-11-05 05:43:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/403052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intravenusann/pseuds/intravenusann
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve likes to sit outside cafés and sketch the city he loves and her people. As long as Tony Stark is working on rebuilding Stark Tower, that includes him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Filling in the Details

**Author's Note:**

> There's some flirting, if you want to see it that way, but it could just be friendly chatter between two people who are stumbling towards friendship.

Steve could still see the city he grew up in under all the glitter and grime. Over the past seventy years many of the buildings had taken a beating, from age, weather, riots, and alien invasions, but he saw the past in doorframes and fenestrations. He could sit outside as long as it didn’t rain and scratch away, peeling away the decades with his pencil on paper until New York looked familiar again. 

The future wasn’t worth fearing, though, so he drew anything particularly interesting from it. A boy marching down the street in a full three piece suit in six different colors and sneakers with silver accents, a courier with rows of spikes running along the lines of her helmet, a man in jeans and cherry red high heels, a woman in a slinky black cocktail dress and mismatched converse all stars — the people of New York were always worth noting, always worth at least a sketch even if he had to work a lot from memory as they breezed past him.

He frequented this café almost entirely because it wasn’t a Starbucks, which he’d taken an immediate disliking toward. They baked their own pastries and, after he’d asked, they started to sell bottled Coca Cola with real sugar. That combined to guarantee he would patronize this café whenever he was in New York — and he has always been a bit of a homebody. 

“Fancy meeting a man like you in a place like this,” someone said, over his shoulder.

He knew it was Stark, but it seemed polite to acknowledge him, so Steve turned around and felt his smile fall flat. Stark’s face was half obscured by dark sunglasses and a black, shapeless hat. He wore a black jacket over a black sweater, not even the same blacks. If not for his beard, Steve might not recognize him. No, that was an overstatement. He’d know Tony Stark by the sound of his voice, the swagger in his step, the way he drank coffee like it was motor oil and he was secretly a robot (Steve had entertained the thought once or twice).

“Nice to see you too,” Steve settled on.

“You’re always here, figured the coffee must be good,” Tony replied, as though the revelation that he knew Steve’s regular whereabouts was no big deal.

Steve could only sigh and ask, “Well is it?”

“It’s alright,” Tony told him. Then he tipped his head back and finished the cup in one endless swallow.

“So alright you’re going to get another one, hm?” Steve asked.

He turned back to his work, resting the end of his pencil against his lower lip.

“You betcha,” Tony said, sauntering back into the café.

He returned with his coffee in one hand and a coke in the other.

“The wonderful girl at the counter—“

“Shawnice,” Steve interrupted him.

“Yes, yes, Shawnice was so kind as to inform me that you like the cokes here, so I couldn’t resist,” Tony told him.

Where Steve sat straight in his chair with both feet on the concrete, Tony Stark turned the metal seat so that he could face Steve and still sit at an angle, with one leg crossed over the other. He leaned in a way that almost made the chair tip and the foot that was on the ground was bouncing up and down anxiously.

“Thank you,” Steve said, reaching out and cracking the top off the bottle with one hand.

He moved to a blank spot in his sketch book and started to draw out the basic shapes that made up Tony Stark, lots of sharp angles and energetic lines.

“The tower construction is coming along great, of course, since I’m directing it,” Tony said. “I can only do so much of the work myself, though, which can be… frustrating.”

Steve looked up. Tony didn’t normally stretch out his consonants, which suggested he had meant to say something instead of simply “frustrating.” Tony couldn’t possibly be trying to censor his language in front of Steve, but there was little other reasonable explanation.

“So, have you heard from Clint and Natasha?” Tony asked him.

“No, I haven’t,” Steve admitted. “Are they alright?”

“Well, as alright as they can be, you know, fighting the good fight in dangerous warzones,” Tony said. “Not my cup of tea, obviously, but whatever Soviet Spy Barbie and her pet archer have to do to get their rocks off, I guess. Different strokes for different folks.”

Steve frowned at the way Tony flippantly dismissed Natasha as some kind of plastic doll and Clint as a pet, but it was just how he was about people he cared about. He called them both by their names, at least, and was smart enough not to call Natasha anything but that to her face. Maybe there was some truth to his supposed genius.

“And how is Banner holding up?” Steve asked.

“You don’t have to ask it like that,” Tony said.

He threw an arm over the back of the metal chair and leaned a little further back.

“But since you did,” he continued. “R&D is everything I promised him and more and not even the construction noise can break that man’s anger zen. I’m pretty sure if I left him alone long enough he’d find a cure for cancer that also worked as a renewable energy source, but you know me, I can’t leave anyone alone.”

Tony was grinning at him, so Steve acknowledged it with a little twitch of his lips. Of course he understood that Tony Stark was really talking about him, he just didn’t know why it was important.

“So, what brings you back from small town, Wisconsin or Montana or wherever you were?”

“I like New York,” Steve told him, drawing in vague details of Tony’s mouth and remembering how his eyes looked behind those ridiculous shades.

“So do I,” Tony said. “But I also like Malibu and, oh, Majorca. You know, I have a little place in Cannes if you wanted to visit France again, you know, without the imperative of punching Nazis.”

“I’m still working my way through the states,” Steve offered. “But… New York is home.”

“Ah,” Tony said, reaching for his coffee. “So where exactly in New York? Because I’ve seen your apartment and I think you could do better, if you wanted I could build space into…”

“My apartment fits my needs,” Steve told him.

“And its bill is footed by SHIELD,” Tony retorted.

“Would it be better if it was paid for by Stark Industries?” he asked.

“You really have to ask that?” Tony asked back. “I designed that fancy helicarrier for Fury, you think I can’t do anything ten times better than SHIELD can?”

Steve gave Tony his best incredulous look and continued to work on his sketch while Tony sulked a bit, as though his silence was some kind of insult. He kept up his quiet pouting for some time, actually, and Steve was a bit impressed. It seemed most of the time that Tony Stark thought he had to keep talking in order to continue breathing.

The silence broke with the scrap of the metal chair’s feet against cement. Tony looked over Steve’s shoulder then, with coffee breath and an unwashed smell of sweat and engine grease. Steve flipped the page as fast as he could while appearing casual.

“Were you drawing _me_?” Tony asked.

“No,” Steve answered. If he sounded petulant it was only because Tony’s ego didn’t need any more inflating.

“You were totally drawing me,” Tony said. “Well, Steve, I’m very flattered, but you should get my good side next time. You’re the artist, you should know that.”

“You don’t have a good side,” Steve said, grinning into his sketchbook.

“You’re right,” Tony answered. “What am I talking about, they’re both amazing.”

Steve tried, but couldn’t quite stifle his laughter.

“You know,” Tony said. “My dad kept some sketch you gave him. Had it framed. I think it’s hanging in the tower somewhere, maybe his old office. I’ll ask Pepper, you could drop by and see it sometime.”

“No,” Steve said, automatically. “But thank you.”

Tony frowned, then quickly changed the subject.

“You know, you could get a tablet and draw with that,” he said.

Steve looked for some meaning in Tony’s expression for what a tablet was, then said, finally, “This works fine.”

“Yeah, I guess you’d need to take a computer along with you and that’s not as convenient—unless, you know, I could probably make you some kind of combination tablet computer and drawing tablet, then you’d just need a stylus and it could do whatever you wanted it too, pencils, charcoal, paints.”

Tony’s words spilled on and on, rambling about touch responsiveness and pixel ratios.

“What I’ve got has worked out for me just fine,” Steve assured.

“Yeah, but it’s so—“ Tony cut himself off and threw a dramatic little coughing fit.

“What? It’s so what, Tony?” Steve asked. “Old fashioned?”

“Yeah, that,” he said, muttering behind his hand and reaching again for his coffee.

“It’s empty,” Steve warned him, just before he tipped it back and got nothing.

“I’ll have to go in and get another,” Tony said. 

He stood up, the feet of his chair screeching along the sidewalk.

“Care to join me?” he asked.

Then, as though on cue, it began to drizzle softly, in a cold, grey way that threatened Steve’s sketchbook. He tucked in into his jacket and followed Tony inside before it started to really rain.

“Well, there’s less to see in here, but at least its warm.”

Steve considered saying something, but warmth was reassuring. 

“There’s enough to see,” Steve told him, thinking that he could draw a sketch of Shawnice to thank her for everything she’d done over the time he’d been visiting.

“Oh, Steve, really, you’re going to make my head swell,” Tony said, queuing up for his third coffee.

“You mean it can get any bigger?” Steve asked, mocking his own ‘it can really do that?’ tone.

Tony just grinned at him and asked, “So, another coke too?”

"Sure," Steve agreed, because he might as well.

"You know, if I made you a tablet, I could totally build it to be waterproof," Tony said, giving him a look that was a little too eager.

Steve wanted to tell him to take all that energy and direct it into playing with his armor or something, but he knew he had to make it clear he didn't want this hypothetical tablet or it was sure to show up on his apartment's mailbox next week. Tony was a lot of different things when he was being Tony Stark, eccentric playboy, instead of Iron Man, Avenger, but he had a certain maniacal determination whenever he got an idea in his head.

"No, Tony," he said, trying hard not to make it sound too much like an order.

"Yes, sir," Tony answered. "You've made your point, for which I think you're being more than a bit of a luddite, but I'll drop it. Just, you know, swing by the tower sometime."

"I can do that," Steve told him.

The smile Tony flashed him then, didn't have nearly enough teeth to be a grin, and up close Steve thought he could see the lines around Tony's eyes through his shades. The smile felt genuine and he couldn't help but smile back.


End file.
